On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 04:28:24PM -0700, Brian de Alwis wrote:
> Hello everybody.  I'm seeing some strange DNS resolving behaviour
> with firefox, and have run out of leads.
> 
> At home I get to freeride off an open wireless connection.  But
> it's subject to frequent bouts of interference and so the signal
> fades in and out over the course of a day.
> 
> I've found that Firefox will start to exhibit rather strange DNS
> lookup behaviour under this situation, where hostname lookups take
> extraordinarily long periods of time to resolve -- and sometimes
> are never resolved.  But utilities like ping are able to resolve
> the name relatively quickly.  This behaviour disappears if I quit
> and restart firefox, but it will reappear if I stop using it for
> a bit.  Replacing the hostnames with the IP addresses works fine.
> 
> These problems don't occur when I'm at the university, where I'm
> behind a reliable fat pipe.
> 
> Does this ring any bells with anybody?

I've seen slightly different kludgy behavior with Firefox name
resolution...

On my laptop here I'm running caching DNS. Resolv.conf points there. I
had a couple of reasons to do this, but one of those was Firefox.

*Before* that, mostly on DSL at home but sometimes on a fat pipe at work
Firefox would hang forever[1] trying to resolve something. I'd flip to a
shell and dig/host/ping or whatever and it would work flawlessly. Back
to Firefox and no joy. No other programs had any trouble.

I never looked further into it after starting up my own caching DNS, so
that's the only solution I can offer.

[1] Forever meaning minutes. Typical of screwed DNS.

-- 
Darrin Chandler            |  Phoenix BSD Users Group
dwchandler@stilyagin.com   |  http://bsd.phoenix.az.us/
http://www.stilyagin.com/  |